Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

Headline:Chile warms to re-electing billionaire Sebastián Piñera

Sub-headline: Country swings to the right as Latin American ‘pink tide’ recedes

‘Pink Tide‘ is a descriptor, or more aptly a propaganda ploy, to bait The Financial Times readership. To describe any political expression that deviates from the Free Market Gospel, that is by definition an expression of dreaded ‘Leftism’ , even if it be Left Wing Social Democracy. The headline should read The Editors of the Financial Times’ nostalgia for The Chicago Boys. Pinochet gets a mention in a sentence, that doesn’t even refer to those harbingers of disaster, better to call them Milton Friedman’s Army of Corporatist Hacks! Chile’s conservative society produced Salvador Allende, yet the ‘political cleansing’ that Pinochet practiced remade Chile? The Financial Times recognizes the ‘ruthless dictatorship’ of Pinochet, but fails to mention the costs of the Monetarist Utopianism of Mr. Friedman’s minions.

Chile’s conservative society has produced a more stable political system in the last quarter century since Pinochet quit power, after presiding what began as one of the region’s most ruthless dictatorships.

The above quote mere window dressing, for the hope of a return of a Corporatist to the leadership of Chile. This essay relies on quotations from Piñera‘s fellow travelers, and a nod to another Free Marketeer, Macri as savior of Argentinian Political Virtue: its return to the Neo-Liberal coterie of nations, by way of a billion dollar ransom paid to Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer.

More importantly Michelle Bachelet is a Socialist. Here is an excerpt from Bachelet’s Wikipedia entry, that provides the necessary political/historical context for The Financial Times’ ‘Pink Tide’:

‘Facing growing food shortages, the government of Salvador Allende placed Bachelet’s father in charge of the Food Distribution Office. When General Augusto Pinochet suddenly came to power via the 11 September 1973 coup d’état, Bachelet’s father was detained at the Air War Academy under charges of treason. Following months of daily torture at Santiago’s Public Prison, he suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death on 12 March 1974. In early January 1975, Bachelet and her mother were detained at their apartment by two DINA agents,[14] who blindfolded and drove them to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago, where they were separated and subjected to interrogation and torture.[15] In 2013 Bachelet revealed she had been interrogated by DINA chief Manuel Contreras there.[16] Some days later, Bachelet was transferred to Cuatro Álamos (“Four Poplars”) detention center, where she was held until the end of January. Thanks to the assistance of Roberto Kozak,[17] Bachelet was able to go into exile in Australia,[18] where her older brother, Alberto, had moved in 1969.[10] Of her torture, Bachelet said in 2004 that “it was nothing in comparison to what others suffered”. She was “yelled at using abusive language, shaken,” and both she and her mother were “threatened with the killing of the other.” She was “never tortured with electricity,” but she did see it being done to other prisoners.[19] ‘

Look no further for confirmation of Ms. Bachelet’s status as Left/Pink ( In the McCarthy Era, American Leftists were called ‘Pinkos‘). She eventually sought refuge in East Germany-where were she and her mother to go?

In May 1975 Bachelet left Australia and later moved to East Germany, to an apartment assigned to her by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government in Am Stern, Potsdam; her mother joined her a month later, living separately in Leipzig. In October 1976, she began working at a communal clinic in the Babelsberg neighborhood, as a preparation step to continue her medical studies at an East German university. During this period, she met architect Jorge Leopoldo Dávalos Cartes, another Chilean exile, whom she married in 1977. In January 1978 she went to Leipzig to learn German at the Karl Marx University’s Herder Institute (now the University of Leipzig). Her first child with Dávalos, Jorge Alberto Sebastián, was born there in June 1978. She returned to Potsdam in September 1978 to continue her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin for two years. Five months after enrolling as a student, however, she obtained authorization to return to her country.[20]

Washington, D.C., September 11, 2013 – Henry Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile because his “‘model’ effect can be insidious,” according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The coup against Allende occurred on this date 40 years ago. The posted records spotlight Kissinger’s role as the principal policy architect of U.S. efforts to oust the Chilean leader, and assist in the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

The documents, which include transcripts of Kissinger’s “telcons” — telephone conversations — that were never shown to the special Senate Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in the mid 1970s, provide key details about the arguments, decisions, and operations Kissinger made and supervised during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state.

“These documents provide the verdict of history on Kissinger’s singular contribution to the denouement of democracy and rise of dictatorship in Chile,” said Peter Kornbluh who directs the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. “They are the evidence of his accountability for the events of forty years ago.”

Today’s posting includes a Kissinger “telcon” with Nixon that records their first conversation after the coup. During the conversation Kissinger tells Nixon that the U.S. had “helped” the coup. “[Word omitted] created the conditions as best as possible.” When Nixon complained about the “liberal crap” in the media about Allende’s overthrow, Kissinger advised him: “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”

The reader can count on the Financial Times to print reliable apologetics for Corporatism, in all its iterations. The receding‘Pink Tide‘ in Latin America being indicative of same, using Macri’s rise in Argentina, the ‘political chaos’ in Venezuela, yet Bolivia’s Evo Morales’ Evonomics still holds!

The worst enemy of humanity is capitalism. That is what provokes uprisings like our own, a rebellion against a system, against a neo-liberal model, which is the representation of a savage capitalism. If the entire world doesn’t acknowledge this reality, that the national states are not providing even minimally for health, education and nourishment, then each day the most fundamental human rights are being violated. – Evo Morales[254]

This reader is always struck, by the fact that just the most perfunctory checking of the internet, always produces actual historical evidence that just confirms the fact that The Financial Times prints Capitalist propaganda, couched in the highfalutin rhetoric of Free Market Utopianism.